Othèr űnnæcessåry diácrîtiçal mârks, FaцxCyяillic, and gratuitøus slashed ø's alsø shów up occâsioñally in mûsic, althøugh theý're Иot as pøpular or icônic of metäl as the ümläüt. Excessive use of this trope becomes £33.

Üsed very frequently in parödies, where band names can even have Um̈lauẗs over con̈son̈an̈ẗs; in fact it's well on its way to Discredited Tropedom if it's not there already.

It must be nöted that this tröpe is about the gratuitoüs usage of umlauts, not "any usage of umlauts". Some artists from countries where umlauts are used in the local language have a genuine ümlaut in their band or personal names. Einstürzende Neubauten and Björk are therefore not examples of this trope.

Incidentally, the only letters in German that include umlauts are ä, ö and ü. They are pronounced, respectively, as: the e in bed (like a combination of a & e); a French "eu", which happens occasionally in English such as the i in sir (o + e); and a French u, made by forming the letter o with your lips, and voicing "eeeee" (u + e). The bands should therefore be pronounced "Mo-tuhrr-head" and "Blue Uhy-ster cult". (If you have a non-rhotic accent, the first two sounds are changed to "air" and "ur".) Ironically, the idea that a heavy rock band could make itself look hard and tough by adding umlauts is one that provokes amusement among many native German speakers, who apparently associate the letter "ö" with "cute", "sweet", "cuddly"...

In common Metal parlance, however, gratuitous umlauts are not pronounced, but this hasn't stopped fans of Queensrÿche asking about the .

Not to be confused with other uses of diaereses (also called trema), in which diacritic marks identical to umlauts can appear in some English words. A diaeresis was traditionally used in vowel pairings where the second vowel is pronounced in a separate syllable, hence they are found in archaic spellings of words such as coöperate, preëmptive or Zodiäc. This usage is largely obsolete, though it is still part of the house style of The New Yorker magazine and MIT Technology Review, but survives in words like naïve which are borrowed from languages which do use diaereses to varying degrees. In modern English, umlaut is used in one special case, over "e" at the end of the word, where it denotes a pronounced "e" instead of silent "e", such as the Brontë siblings.

Gratuitous umlauts usually cause unnecessary embarrassment amongst the native speakers of those languages, whose ortography does use umlauts. An umlaut usually denotes the vowel is pronounced as frontal. Ä denotes a frontal a, like "cat", while A without umlauts is the back vowel, like "car". Likewise, Ö denotes a frontal o phoneme [usually denoted in English as ir or ur ], not unlike "sir", while O without umlaut is back vowel O, like "dog". Languages which use umlaut vowel shift are German, Swedish, Finnish, Skolt Sami, Karelian, Estonian, Hungarian, Luxembourgish, North Frisian, Saterlandic, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Rotuman, Slovak, Turkish, Tatar, and Turkmen. A lesser example is Spanish, where they have only "Ü" (Portuguese used to have it too before language reforms). Often Ä and Ö are treated as completely separate letters from A and O, appearing at the end of the alphabet beyond Z.

Unicode represents it as "Spın̈al Tap", since not only does the n have an ümlaut, but the i has no dot over it. While the dotless i does exist in Unicode (for example, in Turkish), the n with an umlaut doesn't, which makes it a bit trickier to type (you have to use a "combining diaeresis" character). (For the record, the character n̈ does in fact exist in some Mesoamerican languages, where it represents the same sound as English -ng.)

In Zodiac, a local metal band is mentioned, and off-handedly dismissed by a metal fan as a "two-umlaut band".

Not an example: In The Lord of the Rings and other works by Tolkien, the Elvish language Quenya has diaeresis that are superfluous, but not random (that is, they're predictable and they can be left out without change of pronounciation or meaning). They're mostly there to remind English speakers to pronounce final E's (as in únótimë) and split combinations of vowels that don't form a diphthong (as in Eärendil). On the other hand, his use of acute and circumflex accents is significant and marks a difference in pronounciation.

Rodrick's band Löded Diper from Diary of a Wimpy Kid (though Greg says he probably doesn't know how to spell "Loaded Diaper" anyway).

In Year Zero, one of the characters — who is made out of a substance that is literally the heaviest metal in the universe — is named Özzÿ.

The publisher's blurb for Loki's Child describes the novel as being "so metal that even the consonants require umlauts." (Going by the Amazon reviews, it doesn't really live up to the hype.) The cover sports an umlaut over the "o" in the title, and another umlaut above the "n" in the author's name.

Incidentally, band names with Heavy Metal Umlauts on them tend to look very silly to Finnish-speakers, because they actually know how to pronounce umlauted letters. The same is true for speakers of most other languages that use umlauts (German, Swedish etc).

Norwegian and Danish do not actually use umlauts, but everyone knows (due to exposure to Swedish and to a lesser degree the other languages that use them) that ö is equivalent to ø, ä to æ and so on.

In The Muppet Show, The Swedish Chef's rendition of "Popcorn" is spelled "Pöpcørn"note In case anyone is curious the Swedish word for Popcorn is, well, "popcorn". Since the word is imported directly from English however it does not follow phonetic standards. A Swedish rendering of how the word is actually pronounced would be "påppkårn".

In an episode of Reaper, a wannabe rocker/Dreadful Musician whose great idea of a stage name is just "Ryan" almost does a literal Deal with the Devil and becomes the even-more-ludicrous-sounding "Ryän".

In Kamen Rider Gaim, the Transformation Trinket is the Sengoku Driver. Fitting in with Gaim's samurai theme, "sengoku" refers to the Warring States Era, but in this instance the "goku" means "extreme" rather than "states". Fansubbers &A Elig;sir woolseyized this as the Wärring Driver with an umlaut over the A. However, this created problems later on when it turned out that the belts were named for their creator, Ryoma Sengoku, forcing them to refer to him as "Ryoma Wärring"note The &A Elig;sir team later said that if they had known about Ryoma from the start, they would have kept the "Sengoku" name.

One of the Breaking Bad minisodes reveals that Jesse and his friends used to have a band named TwaüghtHammër.

Subverted with Arabian Rap Gröûp X, which even has a "heavy metal caret."

There was a funny real-life incident when Motörhead was playing in Germany, and the fans chanted the bands name as it's pronounced in German. Like the Motley Crue example, this could just be an urban legend, though, since it wouldn't be pronounced all that differently than it is in English.

And within Motörhead, their guitarist Würzel

Title of their 2010 album and the following tour: The Wörld is Yours. Germans can't mispronounce this, by the way.

There is a German cover band called AD/AC Motörwelt (which, you guessed it, covers AC/DC and Motörhead). The name is strictly for puns sake - ADAC Motorwelt is the journal of the ADAC, the largest German car interest club.

German punk rock band Die Ärzte (The Doctors), whose name in normal German is written with an 'Ä' already, tend to use an A with three dots. (Also, they decided on the name because there wasn't a band with Ä as the first letter back then.)

Maxïmo Park probably counts as gratuitous since the ümlaut apparently doesn't change the pronunciation in any way.

Though it's not normally part of the band name, the cover of Kid 606's Shout at the Dönernote the umlaut in "döner" is correct in Turkish has an umlaut over the zero in the band logo, since the artwork parodies Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil.

Kypck (Kursk) plays with this as the spelling looks just weird but is actually correct Cyrillic. Although their website uses Mock Cyrillic.

Averted by Finnish heavy metal band Teräsbetoni where the umlaut is NOT gratuitous. The name is perfectly good Finnish, and means "reinforced concrete".

Hüsker Dü took their name from a Danish/Norwegian phrase and added gratuitous umlauts. They used the name because they didn't want to be pigeonholed as just another Hardcore Punk band.

Rap duo Dälek (pr. "die-uh-lek") use the umlaut to combine the word "dialect" (as pronounced in exaggerated rap dialect) with the popular Doctor Who villains. A neat little three-layer-cake of a pun.

As in his lyric "Deadverse spoken with broken dälek"

One band deliberately misspelled "cornet" as "corønet", parodying both the Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut and a very common misspelling of "cornet" (which spellcheckers won't pick up, because it's also a real word).

Nǽnøĉÿbbrğ VbëřřĦōlökäävsŦ. How is this pronounced? The expected answer is "Nanocyborg Uberholocaust". The real answer is that you just wince and look away.

The Canadian Celtic/Appalachian/Acadian/folk band Scrüj MacDuhk (now either disbanded or simply known as The Duhks, depending on your point-of-view) is a decidedly non-metal example of this.

Pop singer Jason Derülo is also a non-metal version of this. His real name is Jason Desrouleaux: derülo is exactly how a German or Scandinavian would pronounce desrouleaux.

R&B singer and actress Mýa is an example of this not applied just to performers, because Mýa is her birth name.

Rapper Jay-Z had a version of this (Jaÿ-Z) on his very first album, Reasonable Doubt.

Röyksopp is a Norwegian electronica duo. The reason for the alternative orthography is not clear, but one might wonder if it has something to do with how "røyksopp" simply is the Norwegian word for "puffball" (ø in Norwegian is equivalent in sound value to German and Swedish ö).

Daniel Amos (an alternative rock band you could only mistake for metal if you've never heard any metal before) released an album named Calhöun. On the album cover, they abbreviated their name as "Dä".

Green Jellÿ. They were Green Jellö until the trademark infringement suit. The band states that the "ÿ" in their name is pronounced like an "o," so their name is still pronounced "Green Jell-O."

Had a live album "Triple Live Möther Gööse at Budokan".

Visual Kei band Girugämesh proves that even Japanese bands can rock the purely aesthetic umlaut.

Gwar parodied this with the song titles on their album Hell-O: Almost every song on the album has at least one gratuitous umlaut or other diacritical mark in it - "I'm in Löve (With a Deåd Dog)" for instance.

British 80's space-rock band Underground Zerø, Hawkwind soundalikes who abbreviate their name to 'UZØ, using a marked vowel from a less warlike Germanic language.

Obscure Hamburg punk band Kränkshäft. German would write "crankshaft" phonetically exactly this way.

Gröûp X not only has an umlaut over the o, but a caret over the u.

Psyborg Corp's The Frozen Shrines of Obsÿdÿana.

The English singer/songwriter Chlöe Howl is an unintentional example; her name was intended to be spelled "Chloë" (standard spelling; the dots over the e are not a case of the trope, but simply indicate that the o and e are pronounced as two separate sounds) but was misspelled on her birth certificate.

Nëwspäpër Cömïcs

Bloom County. Deathtöngue. "A bird on the bass, a tongue - what a face! At best, the music can best be described as lame..."

Rock Band 2 has an achievement called "Needs More Umlauts!", which is awarded the first time you create a band logo. This is a double reference to Blue Öyster Cult, who started this trope and gained more popularity through SNL's "Needs More Cowbell" sketch, which the Rock Band games make a LOT of references to.

Ecstatica, or Ečstati̊ca, features a heavy metal caron as well as a an I with a ring (which doesn't exist in Unicode and has to be composed using a combining character). Cover art here.

The Heavy Metal game Brütal Legend, starring Jack Black as a roädie who gets sucked into a fantasy world fueled by The Power of Rock, features a Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut in its title. In Xbox Magazine, the creator confessed that the umlaut is there solely because, as a game about heavy metal, it just had to be. (Oddly enough, "brütal" pronounced in German would sound like the correct French pronunciation of "brutal.")

Yahtzee in his review of the game consistently tries to pronounce it "Brew-tal Legend". In the credits he states that since he's studied German he's not letting the umlaut go unpronounced.

The first mark in The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is the banker... named Barön Ömötö. However, the one voice clip that plays (an advertisement) pronounces all the ö's long, making his name sound like oe-MOE-toe.

In Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: Baddest of the Bands, Strong Bad forms a band with the King of Town and Homsar in his effort to win the Battle Royale of the Bands (reluctantly, since they were the only people not already in the contest). They end up calling themselves D-Ö-I.

Also, when looking at the banner for Bubs' and Coach Z's band, Two-O-Duo, Strong Bad mentions that the name would "be much cooler with a few umlauts".

In the Escape Velocity data files, every EV-specific resource type includes a gratuitous umlaut (e.g. "shïp" for spacecraft, "düde" for named characters, etc), to avoid collisions with the built-in system resources.

The lack of this trope in Atlus' localized versions of the first two Super Robot Wars Original Generation games led to some serious Fan Wank over the presumed "correct" spellings of certain characters' names which continues to this very day. The biggest one being over Sänger Zonvolt, who due to the way Japanese phonetics works, has his name pronounced as "Ze-n-ga-ru" in games that feature voice acting, thus resulting in a number of fans who insist that his name is "Zengar" or some variant thereof.

In PVP, most of the main cast are members of the fictional band "Djörk"... "Nerd rock forever", as one of them put it. Originally, they wanted to call it "Umlaüt" but it turned out to have been already taken by a real band.

Home Movies: Duane's garage band SCÄB, with music by (the Real Life) Brendon Small, whose other cartoon band Dethklok is curiously ümlaut-free (although the band logo sometimes stylizes it as DëthkløK).

It seems to be a trend. There are also the yogurt chains Freshëns and Yogen Früz.

The reason it looks Danish to English eyes is the similarity with "Copenhagen". A real Artistic License - Linguistics, because the Danish name of Copenhagen is actually København.

Häagen-Dazs' competitor from the 80's, Frusen Glädjé, is a subversion since it's an actual Swedish phrase meaning "frozen joy" or "frozen delight", except that the proper spelling has no accent over the last "e" (and the accent seems to have been to get Americans to pronounce the "e" instead of saying "froosen gladge").

Ironically, Häagen-Dazs tried to sue Frusen Glädjé for, among other things, deceptive trade practices over the umlauts and other elements suggesting a Scandinavian name. This did not get passed the judge who pointed out Häagen-Dazs did the same thing they were accusing the defendant of.

"Möben"- or rather, Moben, a well-known British kitchen maker- responded to complaints of passing itself off as German by pointing out that the "umlauts" are not part of the name itself, merely an "artistic device" that formed a part of their logo and "that any resemblance with an umlaut is coincidental".

There's also the Swedish homewares chain (and IKEA clone) Clas Ohlsson, whose British advertising goes in for these with pseudo-Swedish nonsense like "Usefulshöpp" (approximately "usefulshurp"). (For those wondering, the Swedish word for "shop" is not "shöpp", but "butik" (from boutique) "affär" when they don't just use the word "shop" itself).

The Bödyplex gyms in and around Atlanta, Georgia. They're universally referred to as "Bootyplex" by locals.

Android phones tries to earn extra credit for not only putting an umlaut on an r, but by putting it inside the r instead of above it.

In Oulunkylä, a suburb of Helsinki, it is sometimes possible to see a car that looks very much like a police car. Only instead of Poliisi (police) it says Rosvå. Not quite purely decorative, however, as å is pronounced the same as o, only longer, so it almost sounds like rosvo, the Finnish word for thief.

Jäääär is a legitimate word in Estonian (it means "ice-edge") even though it looks totally ridiculous to foreigners.

As is pää-äänenkannattaja (main supporter [newspaper]) in Finnish. Ice edge would be jäänääri or jäänreuna in Finnish. Umlauts are not gratuitous.

Backfired by American heavy metal band Trojan, who used umlaut over 'o' on their concert T-shirts. That failed spectacularly in Sweden, as tröjan means simply "the shirt" in Swedish...

A brand of rice-pudding dessert marketed in Britain by the German Müller company is called Püd. Slightly ridiculous as to pronounce it the way it is spelt would make it Peuhd, rather than the intended English abbreviation "Pud" for "pudding".

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